During the summer before I turned fourteen, my family took a vacation to visit my mother’s parents in Canada. Family crawled out the woodwork up there. There was a grandmother AND a grandfather, aunts and uncles and cousins galore! Back home in New York, there was my grandmother, my aunt [my father’s mother and his sister] and her husband — that was all. There were no other aunts and uncles, no great aunts and uncles and definitely no cousins. I wanted to know why. What happened to everyone? And that wanting to know is what started my obsession with genealogy.

My interest in resuming my research was rekindled during the summer of 2013. I was teaching a quilting technique on an Alaskan cruise. Several women who were quilters but not taking our classes dropped in to visit. During a later conversation with one of these quilters, she shared that she was on the cruise for a genealogy conference. She thought what I was doing was so intriguing and I thought the same about her. I decided that when I returned home, I was going to look into updating my genealogy software and re-entering all of my previous research.

Naturally, I took advantage of the free trial period that came with my Family Tree Maker software. With all the information available online now, it didn’t take me long to become obsessed again — running down this trail and that after falling into one rabbit hole after another. So here I am trying to take advantage of new technology and resources while inputting data gained during my research from 1993-2003 and adding new ancestors and family members to my tree.

My old family history files are a mess. (There. I said it.) My blog is about my attempt to clean them up and document my findings properly and maybe share a few stories and helpful hints along the way.

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